


By Dawn's Early Light

by orphan_account



Category: NCIS
Genre: Angst, Comment Fic, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-29
Updated: 2011-12-29
Packaged: 2017-10-28 10:50:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 476
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/307088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After staying at the office all night, Tony makes sure his masks are in place</p>
            </blockquote>





	By Dawn's Early Light

It isn’t the changing light that wakes Tony, because inside the bullpen, the artificial light never changes. Rather, it’s some deeply buried, primitive instinct that tells humans when the sun is nearly over the rim of the planet.

His neck is stiff and he’s grateful that he had the sense to close the file he was working on before he slumped over and drooled on the papers. Gibbs would notice suspicious saliva stains.

Rubbing his neck, Tony tries to remember what time he finally let exhaustion take him, but the best he can narrow it down is sometime after two in the morning.

His eyes feel gritty and Tony stands slowly, wincing in the harsh lights of the bullpen. He could be in the leafy shade of his apartment, looking at the diffuse light of pre-dawn, but he knows he wouldn’t sleep any better there than he would curled up at his desk. He squints as he makes his way to the restroom.

His bones feel sore and he shuffles like a man who is thirty years older than Tony’s actual age. After hitting forty, stretching seems both like an absolute necessity and an exercise in torture.

In the bathroom, Tony splashes cold water in his face, loosening the crust over his eyes and sending wake up messages to his brain. Picking his head up, he checks his hair and then uses more water to fluff up the flat spot from where he’d been sleeping.

He delays actually looking at himself as long as possible, but the chore is unavoidable. Tony has no desire to be the subject to another one of Gibbs’ attempts to ‘help’ him with his issues. As if his boss wasn’t the least qualified person ever to deal with someone else’s emotions.

Facing the mirror at last, Tony searches carefully for signs on his sleeplessness. He has good skin that has stayed taut, not giving him away with bags or pouches. His eyes are a little puffy but more cold water will take care of that.

Satisfied that his secrets will stay hidden, Tony finally focuses on the whole of his person. The man in the mirror isn’t turning into Gibbs; Jethro is wrong about that. He’s been wrong about so many things, but Tony isn’t going to enlighten him.

Gibbs will never know that everything Tony wants is in that basement. That had been a bad moment – when Jethro had come so close to the truth, but then his shot had gone wide and Tony had been able to breathe again around the suffocating fear of discovery. He would much rather that Gibbs thinks he is a pathetic loser than for his boss to ever discern the truth.

With one last glance to make sure the mask is securely in place, Tony turns away from the mirror to begin another day.


End file.
